An artistic team based in Puerto Rico, Allora & Calzadilla have worked together since 1995 in photography, performance, video, sound, and sculpture. Their efforts transform simple materials into profound metaphors of political encounter. The Land Mark series was created with activists in Vieques, Puerto Rico, an island used for bombing practice by the U.S. military. Protesters worked with the artists to design shoes whose soles register images and words of frustration, destruction, and hope. The shoes were then worn during the protest at the site and their marks photographed, capturing a permanent record of an ephemeral community action.

In Land Mark (footprints), Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla enlist the feet of protestors at Vieques, the former U.S. Navy weapons test site that was for many years a bitter reminder of Puerto Rico’s submission to the power to the north. To the protestors’ shoes the artists added custom-designed soles with subversive slogans and images carved in relief. The beach on which they illegally demonstrated thus became imprinted with their respective visions for the land reclamation campaign, just as it has been imprinted by U.S. bombs.

The work was part of that specific civil disobedience in which they stopped the bombing by the U.S. military [in Vieques, Puerto Rico]. We basically made soles for shoes that could attach with Velcro. All the different organizations that worked with this civil disobedience gave us very direct signatures: “I am against this” or “I want this” or “This is my position,” and historical images, biographical images—an archive of images that were counter-representations of the site’s function. Each person had their own message underneath their shoes. They selected what they wanted to leave in their space. –Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla